Henna Virkkunen, the EU’s incoming tech commissioner, recently announced her ambition to transform Europe into the “AI Continent.” Yet, this bold endeavor raises a critical question: might some efforts to boost Europe’s AI capabilities actually further concentrate power in the hands of the U.S. tech giants that already dominate these technologies?

Consider a proposed Cloud and AI Development Act that would invest in European computing capacity to promote the development of AI across the continent. In her written responses to questions from the EU parliament, Virkkunen wrote that “the Act should give priority to large-scale investments in cloud and AI facilities considered ‘first-of-a-kind’” in terms of environmental sustainability and innovation.

But without additional rules, such a strategy could end up further entrenching the largest cloud computing corporations — Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. These U.S.-based incumbents already hold 72 percent of the cloud market in Europe. Their vast financial resources, economies of scale, extensive partnerships with local internet service providers, and anti-competitive behaviors make it nearly impossible for other actors to compete absent an explicit government plan to promote alternatives. Virkkunen, who stressed the importance of remaining “open to third-country providers,” does not seem to recognize the problem.  

Dependence on foreign cloud giants for such critical infrastructure also undermines another increasingly urgent European goal: protecting the sovereignty of the EU and its individual nation states. Defined as the ability of a nation or jurisdiction to make decisions independently, technological sovereignty has been at the forefront of the EU’s digital agenda since 2020. Recently it gained renewed attention with publication of a major report, by former European Central Bank president Mario Draghi, on how to strengthen European growth and innovation.

The focus on sovereignty reflects growing concern across the EU about the risks of relying on a few overseas tech monopolies for critical communications and other digital infrastructure. These include potential threats to data privacy, systemic vulnerabilities due to extreme concentration of physical computing capacity, the bankrupting of domestic companies pushed out of these markets, even risk of loss of state access to vital systems if the dominant corporations decide to cut service for politically motivated reasons.

Another factor driving the focus on sovereignty is the ongoing AI boom. The EU is keen to play a leading role in the development of “trustworthy” AI and to reap real economic benefits from the new technology. But so far most of the EU’s efforts to develop locally controlled technologies and services have either lacked the necessary scale to challenge the dominance of the tech giants or have been captured by those giants themselves.

Consider Gaia-X, a €1.7 billion Franco-German initiative launched in 2019 to create a sovereign European digital infrastructure. The project rapidly morphed into a fragmented federation of over 350 businesses, plagued by internal disagreements and tensions. Despite the initial aims of the project, U.S. Big Tech corporations have succeeded in leveraging their power and political capital to shape Gaia-X's direction in their favor.

The news is not all bad. The EU has had some success with the launch of its AI Factories initiative. AI Factories is designed to give startups access to public supercomputers and exascale computing resources through the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking project. Since the initiative uses public computing resources, it’s less vulnerable to being captured by the tech monopolists and will effectively reduce companies’ dependence on them.

Arguably the most powerful action the EU could take is to restructure and comprehensively regulate the dominant cloud operators themselves. The incumbents currently rely on a variety of anti-competitive behaviors — including discriminatory pricing, bundling, self-preferencing, and restrictions on customer switching — to maintain their dominance. Measures that would require the separation of these businesses would begin to create space for alternatives, public and private, to emerge. So would measures to enforce interoperability and data portability.

The European Commission — and national governments of member states — could also start to designate the cloud giants as public utilities, as they do with dominant corporations in other critical sectors. This could entail legislation forcing cloud operators to provide fair pricing and non-discriminatory access to customers, in addition to sector-specific obligations relating to data privacy, cybersecurity, sustainability, and resilience.

The EU and its member states already treat many modern digital services, including internet service providers, as de facto utilities and require them to ensure steady service and to treat all traffic equally. Applying similar rules to cloud would be a major step towards transforming private monopoly infrastructure into de facto public infrastructure.

The Open Markets Institute published three seminal articles in the Washington Monthly’s November/December issue.

In the first, policy director Phillip Longman argues that restoring American manufacturing depends on a robust freight rail system, while also detailing how the exact opposite is taking place today as financiers radically downsize the network in pursuit of short-term profit.

In the second article, Center for Journalism & Liberty director Courtney Radsch argues that journalists, artists, and other content creators have more leverage over today’s AI developers than they might realize. “As the spread of AI makes it harder and harder to find quality data for training AI bots,” she writes. 

In the third, Fredrickson sounds the alarm on how far a MAGA White House could go in curbing reproductive rights by outlawing abortion pills and approve other draconian restrictions. “There’s no need for a national abortion ban if the courts can get there under ‘constitutional law’ and thereby take the decision away from the public,” she warns.

The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Representative on Freedom of the Media (RFoM) this week published a new report on Big Tech and media freedom by Dr. Courtney C. Radsch, the director of the Center for Journalism and Liberty at Open Markets. The report connects press freedom with the monopolization of information systems and seeks structural solutions. Specific recommendations for the OSCE’s 57 member states include regulating platform monopolies to prevent anti-competitive practices, establishing fair compensation for content creators, and supporting investigative journalism. “Expanding the frameworks and tools used by States and civil society is essential to uphold media freedom and human rights,” Dr. Radsch writes.